Interlude - Index of

142 | Grown-Up Company
work, and they often think in terms of industry standards.
For instance, an engineer might say, “The NetApp storage
speaks NFS over TCP/IP, two standard protocols, and Oracle
lives on top of Sun Solaris, which handles those protocols,
so that should work fine. And SAP lives on Oracle, which
lives on Sun, which handles NFS, which talks to the storage.
What could go wrong?” (Don’t worry—you aren’t expected to
understand that. When I said it to customers, most of them
didn’t either.)
Businesspeople think differently. They know that eventually
something will break, and when it does, they worry that
a bigger vendor will point at a smaller vendor and say, “That
configuration isn’t certified. Call us back after you’ve replaced
the storage from that company we’ve never heard of.” At that
point, it doesn’t matter at all what should work. That’s why
they insist that all the vendors involved in a solution shake
hands and promise, “If something goes wrong, we will fix it
together.” At first, this insistence on partnerships and certifications
frustrated me, especially since we didn’t have them. In
hindsight, they were right and I was wrong. Eventually things
always do break, and it takes cooperating vendors to fix them.
Our experience with Oracle shows how these partnerships
can evolve. When customers first started using NAS storage
with Oracle databases, in the mid-nineties, both NetApp and
Oracle recommended against it. Back then, even I didn’t think
it made sense to run high-end applications like that over a network.
The customers who did it were so happy, however, that
we approached Oracle to ask if they would support it. Oracle
resisted for years, but—ironically—their engineering department
started using NetApp internally. The external message